Nonproliferation, Arms Control, and Disarmament

Sundays are usually the one day of the week that presidents can count on for a break from their frenetic daily schedule. That wasn’t the case for John F. Kennedy on Sunday, October 21, 1962, the sixth day of the Cuban missile crisis. He would spend his day in meetings and conversations, honing what he would tell the nation and the world the next day. Kennedy began his Sunday by attending 9:00 a.m. Mass at St. Stephen’s Church as he usually did. After returning to the White House, he met with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and reaffirmed the decision he had made the day before to impose a blockade on Cuba. He then met with Gen. Walter Sweeney, the head of the U.S. Air Force Tactical Air Command. The general confirmed what the president had learned in earlier discussions with the ExCom: an air strike would reliably destroy at most 90 percent of the Soviet missiles. So when the planes returned home, some working Soviet missiles could still be pointed at the United States. Kennedy spent his afternoon meeting with the ExCom. The group went line-by-line through the speech that Ted Sorensen had drafted for the president to give to the nation the next night, weighing the political and diplomatic consequences of every sentence. One issue was whether Kennedy should call what the United States was about to do a “blockade” or a “quarantine.” Rusk noted that “The legal meaning of the two words is identical”; stopping ships on the high seas would constitute an act of war under international law regardless of what Washington called it. He preferred calling what the United States was about to do a “quarantine,” however, because it would allow the administration to avoid unflattering comparisons to the blockade that the Soviets had imposed on Berlin in 1948 and 1949. Kennedy accepted Rusk’s point and directed that the term “quarantine” be used. When Kennedy was satisfied with the speech, the discussion turned to what steps the United States should take if the quarantine failed. McNamara and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Maxwell Taylor reviewed the details of two different invasion plans, both of which envisioned that the first of what would eventually become 90,000 U.S. troops would land in Cuba seven days after the air strikes began. The week-long delay between the first air strikes and the start of the invasion troubled Kennedy, who directed the military to look for prudent ways to close the gap. As the president and his advisers worked through numerous other issues raised by the impending quarantine, State Department officials were busy drafting letters from Kennedy to forty-three world leaders, including Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, British prime minister Harold Macmillan, French president Charles de Gaulle, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The letters, which U.S. embassies would deliver the next day, explained what the United States had found in Cuba, why it needed to act, and what it was looking to achieve. The administration was looking to spur U.S. allies to rally around the American position and to minimize the criticism from countries more skeptical of Washington’s intentions. The American public knew nothing of Kennedy’s hectic Sunday schedule. Careful readers of the Washington Post might have suspected something was up; the paper had reported that morning on unusual activity at U.S. military bases in the southeast and concluded that “the sudden appearance of the Marines and their equipment [in Key West] sparked wide speculation as to their ultimate objective in this Cuba-conscious city just 90 miles from Havana.” But for most Americans, October 21 was a typical fall Sunday full of family, friends, and football. Nothing had happened of note. But that was about to change. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

Have you ever faked an illness to get out of a meeting or to avoid an obligation? President John F. Kennedy can do you one better. He faked a cold on Saturday, October 20, the fifth day of the Cuban missile crisis, so he could cancel a campaign tour in the Midwest and return to the White House to meet with his national security team about the U.S. response to the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Kennedy woke up on October 20 in the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, where he had given a speech at a Democratic Party fundraiser the night before. At 10 a.m., his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, called to say that the ExCom was ready to discuss response options with him. Half an hour later, Kennedy’s staff began informing the press and the hosts for the day’s scheduled campaign events that he was running a fever and would be returning to Washington on his doctor’s orders. Kennedy arrived back at the White House a little after 1:30 p.m. He immediately went for a swim. Robert Kennedy sat poolside. The two men chatted when the president took breaks from his laps. The ExCom meeting began at 2:30 p.m. and ran for more than two-and-a-half hours. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara made the case for imposing a blockade on Cuba. It would cause the United States “the least trouble” with its allies, avoid a surprise attack that would be “contrary to our tradition,” be compatible with America’s “position as a leader of the free world,” and be less likely to “provoke a response from the USSR which could result in actions leading to general war.” McNamara admitted that the blockade was not a perfect option. It might take a long time to compel the Soviets to withdraw the missiles from Cuba, “it would result in serious political trouble in the United States,” and “the world position of the United States might appear to be weakening.” There was one other disadvantage to the blockade that the president pointed out: it would allow the Soviets to continue installing missiles with whatever materials were already in Cuba, thereby allowing the threat to the United States to increase. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Maxwell Taylor and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy pressed the case for an air strike, which was nicknamed the Bundy plan. Taylor’s principal argument was that time was not on the U.S. side. More missiles would become operational with each passing day, and the Soviets would have time to hide launch sites, reducing the effectiveness of a preemptive strike. McNamara countered that the air strike would miss some missile sites in any event, leaving the United States vulnerable to a counterattack. Moreover, Taylor’s preferred plan would target far more than just missile launch pads, and in doing so, kill thousands of Soviet soldiers. Moscow would likely retaliate, though not necessarily in Cuba. The United States could not assume that it could control events after that. As the meeting continued, Kennedy and his advisers discussed variations on the two main proposals, including a hybrid version floated by Robert Kennedy in which a blockade would be imposed as a first step to be followed by an air strike if necessary. CIA director John McCone pointed out that U.S. intelligence did not know for certain whether the nuclear warheads that would eventually be matched to the Soviet missiles had already arrived in Cuba. All that was certain was that work had begun on the storage sheds for the warheads. Kennedy and his advisers also discussed whether the United States should offer carrots to entice Moscow to withdraw the missiles. Both McNamara and UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson raised the possibility of offering to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey and either leaving or limiting the use of the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Kennedy dismissed the idea of retreating on Guantánamo as conveying U.S. weakness, but he left open the door to withdrawing U.S. missiles from Turkey. After hearing from his advisers, Kennedy hedged his bets. He told his advisers to proceed with the blockade. But he also directed his national security team to take the steps necessary to give him the option of ordering an air strike against Soviet missile installations in Cuba within forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Kennedy also directed his chief speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, to draft a speech that he would give to the nation on Monday night. The world would soon learn that Kennedy had fibbed about his fever. The reason for his sudden departure from Chicago was far graver than the common cold. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

Presidents aren’t just government leaders, they are also party leaders. So they frequently leave the White House in the weeks before midterm congressional elections to campaign for their fellow party members. That’s precisely what President John F. Kennedy found himself doing on Friday, October 19, 1962, the fourth day of the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy’s campaign trip took him to Cleveland, then Springfield, Illinois (where he placed flowers on Lincoln’s tomb), and finally to Chicago in late afternoon. An estimated half million people stood along the side of the road as Kennedy’s limousine took him from O’Hare International Airport to a $100-a-seat fundraiser at McCormick Place downtown. After watching fireworks over Lake Michigan, Kennedy retired to the Blackstone Hotel for the evening. He would decide the next morning whether to continue with the second day of his campaign swing or return to the White House. As Kennedy hop-scotched across the Midwest, the ExCom continued to meet. The focus was on two options: a blockade or an air strike. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was the leading proponent of the blockade. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor argued for an air strike. Attorney General Robert Kennedy argued against an air strike, saying that “for 175 years this has not been the kind of country which launches Pearl Harbor attacks on Sunday morning. The first American president to do anything like this would not be forgiven by history, by his own people, or by the world.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk missed much of the discussion, as happened frequently over the course of the crisis, because his job required him to meet with so many visiting foreign dignitaries. Meanwhile, a few reporters began to suspect that something was up. In response to a press inquiry, the Defense Department issued a statement: “A Pentagon spokesman denied tonight that any alert has been ordered or that any emergency measures have been set in motion against Communist ruled Cuba. Further, the spokesman said the Pentagon has no information indicating the presence of offensive weapons in Cuba." Kennedy would have to act soon, or find himself chasing the American public reaction rather than shaping it. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

Could you sit through a two-hour meeting with a man who was lying to your face without letting on that you knew he was lying? President John F. Kennedy faced just that challenge on Thursday, October 18, 1962, the third day of the Cuban missile crisis, when he met with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko at the White House. The meeting with Gromyko began at 5:00 p.m. It had been scheduled before Major Richard Heyser’s U-2 spy flight had discovered evidence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Gromyko, who had publicly (and falsely) insisted in his address to the UN  General Assembly three weeks earlier that the Soviet Union had no intention of giving Cuba weapons to threaten the United States, had requested the meeting so he could convey Moscow’s position on Berlin directly to the president. After discussing Germany, Gromyko turned to Soviet concerns about Cuba. Reading from a prepared text, he told Kennedy that the Soviet Union favored peaceful coexistence and opposed countries interfering in the domestic affairs of others. As such, “the Soviet Government and Mr. Khrushchev personally appealed to the President and the United States Government not to allow such steps as would be incompatible with peace, with relaxation of tensions, and with United Nations Charter under which both the US and the USSR had solemnly affixed their signatures.” He repeated what he and other Soviet officials had said many times before: all Soviet military assistance to Havana had only been for “the defensive capabilities of Cuba.” Still unsure how he would respond to the discovery of the SS-4 and SS-5 missiles, Kennedy did not reveal that he knew Gromyko was lying. The president instead stressed that contrary to the presumption underlying the foreign minister’s remarks, the United States had no intention of invading Cuba and that the Bay of Pigs operation had been a mistake. He read a portion of his September 4 statement saying that he would not tolerate a Soviet decision to give Cuba weapons that threatened the United States. When the meeting broke up, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and several other U.S. officials took Gromyko and his entourage to the State Department for a formal dinner that would last until after midnight. The Gromyko meeting had come after a long day in which Kennedy had largely kept to his public schedule, which had him presenting aviation trophies, presiding over a routine Cabinet meeting, and meeting with a former Japanese finance minister. He had two Cuba-specific meetings, one in the late morning and the other in mid-afternoon. But for the most part, the ExCom met without him present, in part so that the White House could maintain an air of normalcy, but also so that the ExCom’s members could talk freely rather than guess what the president wanted them to say. With Gromyko off at the State Department dinner, Kennedy met with the ExCom at 9:15 p.m. Kennedy’s advisers were divided on three options: a full air strike, a limited or “surgical” air strike, or a blockade. Kennedy made no decision, though several of his advisers thought he was leaning toward a blockade as a first step. As Kennedy retired for the night, the American public (and the rest of world) remained in the dark about the crisis that was brewing. But the façade of secrecy was beginning to crack. Several newspapers had run stories that day about military movements in the southeastern United States, forcing the Defense Department to insist at a regular press briefing that “the Air Force has placed no aircraft in Florida in recent months.” When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and CIA director John McCone arrived at the State Department in the early evening to continue discussions about the crisis, reporters asked if they were there for the Gromyko dinner. The two men kept the journalists from asking more questions by saying they were. And nine of Kennedy’s advisers had traveled to the White House from the State Department for the 9:15 p.m. meeting in a single limousine because earlier in the day people had noticed an unusually high number of government cars outside the State Department. Why, they wondered, were so many high ranking officials convening in one spot? The world would soon find out. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

All presidents switch roles repeatedly over the course of their day. One minute they are running meetings on complex policy choices. At the next minute they are exchanging empty pleasantries with visiting foreign dignitaries, carrying out the ceremonial duties of their office, or whipping up the passions of their fellow partisans as another election approaches. But perhaps no president ran the gamut presidential roles quite the way that President John F. Kennedy did on Wednesday, October 17, 1962. As had been agreed the night before, most of the members of the ExCom assembled in a conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department at 8:30 a.m. to assess how to respond to the discovery of nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba. They were joined for the first time by CIA director John McCone, who was fresh back from escorting the body of his stepson, who had been killed in a car crash in California, to Seattle for burial. Kennedy’s advisers debated why the Soviets had taken the risky and provocative step of installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. Undersecretary of State George Ball argued that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had simply misjudged the ramifications of the action. Most of the other officials in the room, including McCone, insisted that the Soviet leader knew full well what he was doing and that it was part of a conscious effort to gain leverage over Kennedy in the ongoing confrontation over Berlin, where a year earlier the East Germans had built the infamous wall dividing the city. McCone and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy left the meeting early to head over to the White House to brief the president. Kennedy directed McCone to go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to brief former president Dwight Eisenhower on the situation and solicit his advice. McCone immediately made the eighty-five mile trip. The retired five-star general agreed that the United States could not tolerate nuclear-tipped missiles ninety miles off the U.S. coast. His preliminary recommendation was military action that targeted Havana. As McCone headed to Pennsylvania and his other advisers continued to meet and discuss possible U.S. options well into the night, Kennedy carried on with his previously arranged public schedule. At 10:00 a.m., he met with the West German foreign minister to discuss the situation in Berlin. He then attended a brief National Day of Prayer service at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. After a lunch with the Crown Prince of Libya, he flew to Connecticut to attend campaign events for Democratic candidates in the upcoming congressional midterm elections, which were then just three weeks away. By the time Kennedy returned to Washington late that night the news from Cuba had become even more grim. Maj. Richard Heyser’s initial U-2 spy flight had found evidence that the Soviets were installing SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles. With a range of up to 1,000 miles, they could hit cities in the southeastern United States “in an arc extending from Savannah, Georgia, to New Orleans, Louisiana.” A subsequent U-2 flight had discovered, however, that the Soviets were also installing longer range SS-5 missiles that could hit targets in every one of the forty-eight continental states but Washington. And unlike the SS-4, the SS-5 required sophisticated launch sites and support facilities, making it virtually certain that the installations were intended to be permanent and not temporary. Unless, of course, the U.S. military destroyed the missiles, or Kennedy found a way to force the Soviets to withdraw them. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

The Cuban missile crisis brought the United States and the Soviet Union closer to nuclear war than any other event during the Cold War. President John F. Kennedy put the odds of war at “somewhere between one out of three and even.” To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the crisis in 2012, I posted each day of the crisis as it unfolded: “Andrei Gromyko Tells a Lie at the United Nations” (September 21, 1962) “Maj. Richard Heyser Flies a U-2 Over Cuba” (October 14, 1962) “The United States Discovers Soviet Missiles in Cuba” (October 15, 1962) “JFK Learns that Soviet Missiles Are in Cuba” (October 16, 1962) “The Executive Committee of the National Security Council” "JFK Solicits Ike’s Advice" (October 17, 1962) "Andrei Gromyko Lies to John Kennedy" (October 18, 1962) "JFK Campaigns While the ExCom Debates Cuba" (October 19, 1962) "John Kennedy Fakes a Cold" (October 20, 1962) "John Kennedy Prepares to Tell the Nation About Soviet Missiles in Cuba" (October 21, 1962) "John F. Kennedy Tells the World that Soviet Missiles Are in Cuba" (October 22, 1962) "The OAS Endorses a Quarantine of Cuba" (October 23, 1962) "Eyeball to Eyeball and the Other Fellow Just Blinked" (October 24, 1962) "Adlai Stevenson Dresses Down the Soviet Ambassador to the UN" (October 25, 1962) "John Scali has Lunch, Khrushchev writes Kennedy, Castro writes Khrushchev" (October 26, 1962) "Black Saturday - Near Calamities Abound as JFK Offers Khrushchev a Deal" (October 27, 1962) "Kennedy and Khrushchev Agree to a Deal" (October 28, 1962) "Secret Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Cuba" (Cuban Missile Crisis, A Coda) Many books have been written on the Cuban missile crisis. Several U.S. officials involved in the crisis wrote firsthand accounts of their experience: A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1966). Arthur Schlesinger’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of the Kennedy presidency provides two chapters on the Cuban missile crisis. Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1969). In a memoir published one year after his assassination, Robert Kennedy reveals the inner workings of the ExCom as it worked to avert nuclear war. Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (1988). McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, devotes seventy pages in his history of the world’s most dangerous weapons to the Cuban missile crisis and its lessons for today. As I Saw It: A Secretary of State’s Memoirs (1990). Dean Rusk, Kennedy’s secretary of state, devotes a chapter of his memoirs to the crisis. Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1993). Dino Brugioni, a CIA photo analyst who helped identify the Soviet missiles, gives an insider’s account of the inner workings of aerial reconnaissance. Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (2008). Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter and one of his closest advisers, devotes a chapter to Kennedy’s decisions during the Cuban missile crisis. Scholars and journalists have explored the crisis in great depth. Here are some of the best: Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971, 1999). Harvard University professor Graham Allison wrote the classic political science study of the Cuban missile crisis in 1971, which he updated after the end of the cold war with the help of University of Virginia professor Philip Zelikow. Essence of Decision is one of the best-selling political science books of all time, and it remains a must-read for students of international relations and political science. One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 (1998). Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali explore the Soviet side of the crisis, using internal Kremlin documents to explore the Soviet leadership’s decision-making process throughout the crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (1999). Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh offer up a blow-by-blow account of the crisis using declassified government documents from before, during, and after the crisis. Averting ’The Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (2003). Sheldon M. Stern, an historian with more than two decades of service at the Kennedy Presidential Library, surveys the crisis through the ExCom meetings, highlighting what individual officials did as well as the broader themes that emerged during the crisis. One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (2008). Michael Dobbs, a long-time foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, describes the series of near-misses and almost-catastrophes that illustrate just how close the world came to nuclear war. The Armageddon Letters: Kennedy, Khruschev, Castro in the Cuban Missile Crisis (2012). James Blight and Janet Lang dramatize the crisis through the letters that Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro wrote, and in doing so highlight the role that the Cubans played in the crisis. The Fourteenth Day: JFK and the Aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis (2012). David Coleman looks beyond the agreement that Kennedy and Khrushchev struck on October 28, 1962 to remove Soviet missiles in Cuba and examines the challenges JFK confronted in making sure that the deal was in fact carried out. Two movies have been filmed about the Cuban missile crisis. The Missiles of October , which was released in 1974 and stars William Devane and Ralph Bellamy among others, was based on Robert Kennedy’s posthumous memoir, Thirteen Days. Hollywood’s first crack at the Cuban missile crisis was shot on video tape to give it a “you-are-there crispness,”  but it misses some of the crisis’s critical events because they weren’t known at the time the film was shot.  Thirteen Days, which was released in 2000 and starred Kevin Costner, has more of a big-budget Hollywood feel. Although it is based on more recent scholarship, the movie has some historical inaccuracies. University of Virginia historian and Cuban missile crisis expert Philip Zelikow says, however, that it is “accurate where it counts.” If you don’t trust how Hollywood portrays the events of October 1962, you can take advantage of one of the things that makes the Cuban missile crisis so unusual, and so attractive to scholars and journalists: President Kennedy secretly taped the meetings he had with his advisers in the White House. Almost none of his advisers knew that their remarks were being taped, so we have a frank, fly-on-the-wall view of their deliberations. Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow collected the transcripts of the secret tapes in The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (2002). You can listen to audio clips of the meetings online at the National Security Archive. PBS commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis by airing two sixty-minute special programs: The Cuban Missile Crisis: Three Men Go to War and Secrets of the Dead: “The Man Who Saved the World”, both of which debuted on October 23, 2012. The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard created a website to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary. The website offers historical context for the crisis, including information on the people involved, primary documents, and lessons learned. The National Security Archive at the George Washington University commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the crisis by creating a website that includes declassified documents, audio clips, photographs, and chronologies. Finally, if you want a timeline of the crisis, choices abound. Some of the best timelines can be found at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and the New York Times. The Times has also compiled some of the articles it published during the crisis.

Hillary Clinton famously ran a political attack ad during the 2008 primary campaign saying that a president had to be prepared for a 3:00 a.m. phone call saying that something bad had happened overseas. For President John F. Kennedy, the proverbial 3:00 a.m. phone call came at 8:45 a.m. on October 16, 1962. The pajama-clad president was sitting in his bedroom reading the newspaper when McGeorge Bundy knocked on the door. The national security adviser had something for the forty-five year-old president: photos showing that the Soviets were installing nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba. Kennedy made a quick decision: he would stick to his morning schedule while Bundy arranged for him to meet with his national security team shortly before noon. So less than forty-five minutes after learning that he had been lied to by Soviet leaders, the president made his way down to the Oval Office. At 9:30 a.m., he met with astronaut Wally Schirra, his wife, and two kids. Playing the gracious host, he took the Schirra family to see Caroline Kennedy’s ponies. Kennedy moved on to private meetings with several members of Congress and then met with members of the Panel on Retardation. With his morning obligations finally finished, Kennedy met in the Cabinet Room with his national security team, which would later become known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExCom for short. The meeting began with Arthur Lundahl of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center briefing everyone on what the photos taken during Maj. Richard Heyser’s U-2 flight showed. A decision was made to order more U-2 flights over Cuba. The discussion subsequently moved to how the administration should respond. (Kennedy had the discussions in the White House secretly taped, and you can listen to excerpts from the conversations here.) Secretary of State Dean Rusk offered two options: one, the quick strike; the other, to alert our allies and Mr. Khrushchev that there is an utterly serious crisis in the making here, and that Mr. Khrushchev may not himself really understand that, or believe that, at this point. I think we’ll be facing a situation that could well lead to general war.  Now with that we have an obligation to do what has to be done, but to do it in a way that gives everybody a chance to pull away from it before it gets too hard. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara raised the possibility of blockading Cuba, but much of the conversation gravitated to possible air strikes against the missile installations. The fact that the United States might resort to military force first troubled Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He quietly passed a note to his brother saying, “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.” Nonetheless, as the meeting wrapped up with an agreement to reconvene late that afternoon, President Kennedy was seriously considering an air strike, at least to eliminate the missile sites.  He indicated that he wanted the Defense Department to begin drawing up plans for an air strike.  For Kennedy, the removal of the missiles was non-negotiable.  Though he hadn’t yet decided on a plan, he said firmly that “We’re going to take out these missiles.” As his advisers scattered to their various offices and agencies to issue orders, demand information, and mull over options, Kennedy left the Oval Office to attend a 1 p.m. lunch for the Crown Prince of Libya, His Royal Highness Sayyid Hasan al-Rida al-Mahdi as-Senussi, who was making his first visit to the United States. In his toast to the Crown Prince, Kennedy jokingly said that “the Shores of Tripoli” are well known to most Americans. At 6:30 p.m., Kennedy met once again with the ExCom. His brother Bobby returned to his earlier concern about how the United States could justify starting a war with Cuba. He wondered if there might be some way to provoke the Cubans or Soviets into using force first, saying that “one other thing is whether we should also think of whether there is some other way we can get involved in this, through Guantanamo Bay or something. Or whether there’s some ship that…you know, sink the Maine again or something.” The ExCom meeting broke up without deciding on a U.S. response. Kennedy, doing what he could to project a sense of normalcy that would keep White House watchers from asking questions and thereby giving himself more time to deliberate, went to a farewell dinner for Charles “Chip” Bohlen at the home of famed columnist Joseph Alsop. Bohlen, one of the State Department’s leading Sovietologists, was about to head off to Paris to take up his duties as the U.S. ambassador to France. Kennedy asked Bohlen to delay his departure, but the ambassador pointed out that doing so might raise questions the president would prefer not to answer. The American public, of course, knew nothing of such conversations, or even that the country faced an immediate peril. Many of them, or at least those who liked baseball, were focused instead on Game 7 of the World Series between the New York Yankees and their former cross-town rivals the San Francisco Giants. Ralph Terry, the goat of the 1960 World Series for giving up the series-ending home run to the Pirates’ Bill Mazeroski, pitched a 1-0 complete game victory, inducing hall-of-famer Willie McCovey to line out with men on second and third and two outs in the bottom of the ninth. It was one of the most thrilling games in baseball history. But few senior officials in the Kennedy administration noticed Terry’s heroics. Their thoughts were elsewhere. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

The phone call came at an inconvenient time for McGeorge Bundy. The forty-three year-old national security adviser was hosting a sendoff dinner for the new U.S. ambassador to France, Charles “Chip” Bohlen. Bundy excused himself and left his guests to take the call. On the other end of the line was Ray Cline, the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence. He was delivering bad news: “Those things we’ve been worrying about,” he told Bundy, “it looks as though we’ve really got something.” It was just after 9:00 p.m. on Monday, October 15, 1962. The Cuban missile crisis had begun. Kennedy administration officials had been worrying for months that the Soviet Union might be installing offensive weapons in Cuba. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had written President John F. Kennedy accusing him of unnecessarily increasing tensions with his September 4 statement on Cuba, and Soviet leaders had publicly denied that they had any intention of using Cuba to threaten the United States. The Soviet reassurances did not persuade U.S. officials. The day before Bundy’s dinner was interrupted, a U-2 spy plane had flown over Cuba taking surveillance photos. The U-2 landed at McCoy Air Force Base near Orlando, Florida, and a courier plane then flew the raw film to the Naval Photographic Interpretation Center in Suitland, Maryland. The plane arrived late that Sunday, and center personnel worked throughout the night to develop the film and make special, clear prints on acetate that trained photo analysts could study over a light table. The first photos reached the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) around 10:00 a.m. on Monday morning. Six hours later they concluded that the photos almost certainly showed SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles, presumably equipped (or ready to be equipped) with nuclear warheads. The conclusion was based in part on comparing the U-2 photos with photos that a Soviet intelligence officer, Lt. Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, had previously passed along to U.S. intelligence. (The Soviets arrested Penkovsky exactly one week after the NPIC’s analysts reached their conclusion, and he was executed for treason in 1963.) When told what the analysts had concluded, NPIC director Arthur Lundahl said, “You know, boys, we could be sitting on the biggest story of our time.” Lundahl pushed his analysts to double check their findings. By 9:00 p.m. they were certain. Lundahl picked up the phone and called Cline, who happened to be at a conference with intelligence officials from Commonwealth countries. Cline in turn began informing other government officials of the news. CIA director John McCone had left Washington just hours earlier to fly to Los Angeles to take the body of his stepson, who had been killed in a car crash, to Seattle for burial. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara received the news of the Soviet missiles while hosting a Hickory Hill Seminar (so-named because the seminars were usually held at Robert F. Kennedy’s Hickory Hill estate) on Soviet cybernetics in his home. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was pulled away from a dinner he was hosting for the West German foreign minister, and he learned the news by phone while standing in the pantry outside the State Department’s State Dining Room. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was hosting a dinner at his house with the deputy secretary of defense, the deputy director of the CIA, and the deputy undersecretary of state among the guests, when a team from the Defense Intelligence Agency arrived to brief him on the photos. One person who wasn’t briefed that night about the U-2’s discovery was President Kennedy. He had wrapped up a five-state campaign tour in Buffalo the day before, and he had returned to the White House well after midnight because of an unscheduled stopover in New York City to discuss the situation in Congo with the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson. Despite the short night’s sleep, Kennedy hosted Algerian president Mohamed Ahmed Ben Bella at the White House. Later in the day, the two presidents issued a joint statement hoping for friendship between the two countries. Bundy’s reason for not informing the president immediately was simple: “I decided that a quiet evening and a night of sleep were the best preparation” that Kennedy could have for the crisis that he now confronted. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

The U-2 is a remarkable plane. It can fly at altitudes above 70,000 feet for hours at a time, and it gave the United States an intelligence advantage from the moment it became operational in 1956. (The U-2 is so good that upgraded versions continue flying missions even today.) Most Americans first learned of the spy plane’s existence in May 1960 when the Soviet military shot down Francis Gary Powers, embarrassing the Eisenhower administration and touching off a crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations. But an even bigger crisis between the two superpowers was triggered by a successful U-2 mission: Maj. Richard Heyser’s flight over Cuba on the morning of October 14, 1962. Major Heyser’s flight began at 11:30 p.m. the night before when he took off from Edwards Air Force base in the Mojave Desert in southern California. Bad weather had kept the thirty-five year-old Air Force veteran and native of Apalachicola, Florida waiting for four days to begin his mission, which was to fly over western Cuba looking for evidence of Soviet offensive weapons. U.S. officials had been worried for several months that Moscow was arming Cuba with weapons that could directly threaten the United States. Reassuring words from Soviet leaders—most recently and publicly from Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko speaking at the United Nations three weeks earlier—had done nothing to quell those fears. The flight to Cuba took Heyser five hours. At 7:30 a.m., he began his reconnaissance run, approaching the island from the south. He was flying fourteen miles high, twice the altitude of commercial jet traffic. The weather over Cuba was picture perfect. As the U-2 entered Cuban airspace he switched on the plane’s camera. His job now was to fly a straight and steady course, which meant not letting his eyes stray far from the circular airspeed indicator. He was flying at an altitude known to U-2 pilots as "coffin corner," where the air was so thin it could barely support the weight of the plane, and the difference between maximum and minimum speeds was a scant six knots (seven mph). If he flew too fast, the fragile black bird would fall apart. If he flew too slow, the engine would stall, and he would nose-dive. He scanned the sky for telltale wisps of smoke from Soviet surface-to-air missiles recently deployed on the island. If he saw a contrail heading in his direction, he was trained to steer an S-pattern, into the missile path and then away from it, so that the missile would zip past him, lacking sufficient power to adjust its course. But no wisps of smoke appeared. It was an uneventful reconnaissance run. After six minutes and 928 photos, Heyser exited Cuban airspace. He adjusted course and headed for his final destination, McCoy Air Force Base near Orlando, Florida. As Major Heyser underwent the standard post-flight debriefing, most Americans were only just beginning their Sunday. Church pews were filling up.  Baseball fans were wondering if the weather would finally allow the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants to play Game 6 of the World Series at Candlestick Park. Football fans eagerly awaited a slate of seven NFL games, including one that pitted the undefeated Green Bay Packers against the winless Minnesota Vikings. President John F. Kennedy was preparing to fly from Louisville, Kentucky to Buffalo, New York, where he would speak at the city’s annual Pulaski Day Parade. What Americans didn’t know that Sunday morning in October was that the photos that Major Heyser had taken were being flown “with all deliberate speed” to the Naval Photographic Interpretation Center in Suitland, Maryland. Once the photos were developed and reviewed, the United States and the Soviet Union would suddenly be locked in a confrontation that would take them to the brink of war: the Cuban missile crisis. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

CFR.org just posted a First Take that I did on President Obama’s speech to the UN General Assembly this morning.  The speech was fairly predictable, and it was undoubtedly aimed as much at American voters as it was to the delegates in the auditorium. Obama denounced the recent wave of attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities, defended freedom of speech, called for the condemnation of hatred and intolerance directed at any religion, and warned yet again of the dangers that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose. One topic that Obama discussed at length that I didn’t mention in my CFR.org piece was Syria. The president denounced a “dictator who massacres his people” and pledged to “stand with those Syrians who believe in a different vision” for their country. But to those hoping—or fearing—that Obama would do more to stop “a regime that tortures children and shoots rockets at apartment buildings,” he offered nothing new. Washington will impose sanctions and threaten those who commit war crimes with prosecution. U.S. military intervention or support, however, is not in the cards. In all, Obama gave just the sort of speech one would expect just six weeks before Election Day in a race that looks headed for the wire and with Republicans intensifying their criticisms of his foreign policy. Diplomats from around the world may have been in the auditorium with Obama, but his real audience was American voters. And his message to them was: I stand up for American interests and values, and I am not about to plunge U.S. troops into yet another messy conflict in the Middle East. (P.S. While President Obama was speaking to UN delegates in Turtle Bay, Mitt Romney was speaking in Midtown Manhattan at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting. I haven’t had a chance to read the governor’s speech in its entirety yet, but its main point seems to be that more conditions should be attached to foreign aid. As previous presidents have discovered, that is easier said than done, especially when it comes to countries that Washington wants something from. Just think back three years to the flap in Pakistan over the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill.)

The UN General Assembly convened this week for its 67th session. Heads of state and foreign ministers will be giving speeches galore. Some will be good. Some will be awful. Most will be forgettable. With any luck, none will be as deceitful as the speech that Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko gave fifty years ago today when he told the General Assembly that the Soviet Union’s military assistance to Cuba posed no threat to the United States. The back story for Gromyko’s speech begins in the summer of 1962 when U.S. intelligence agencies accumulated evidence that the Soviets were shipping weapons to Cuba. The intelligence data alarmed CIA director John McCone. He told President John F. Kennedy in August that the Soviets planned to ship—or perhaps had already shipped—medium-range ballistic missiles to Cuba, a development that would potentially upend the nuclear balance. Although much of the intelligence community thought that McCone’s warning went beyond what the evidence showed, Kennedy nonetheless issued National Security Action Memorandum 181 on August 23, directing the national security bureaucracy to begin thinking about what to do if McCone turned out to be right. Two weeks later, the U.S. intelligence community confirmed that Cuba had received less threatening, conventionally armed surface-to-air missiles from the Soviets. The news prompted Kennedy to issue a statement on September 4 drawing a line in the sand—he would not tolerate a Soviet decision to give Cuba weapons that would threaten the United States: There is no evidence of any organized combat force in Cuba from any Soviet bloc country… of the presence of offensive ground-to-ground missiles; or of other significant offensive capability either in Cuban hands or under Soviet direction and guidance. Were it to be otherwise, the gravest issues would arise… [Cuba] will be prevented by whatever means may be necessary from taking action against any part of the Western Hemisphere. The Soviets insisted that Kennedy had no cause for concern. On September 7, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, told the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, that the Soviet Union had shipped only defensive weapons to Cuba. Four days later, TASS, the official Soviet news agency, made the same claim publicly: The armaments and military equipment sent to Cuba are designed exclusively for defensive purposes...there is no need for the Soviet Union to shift its weapons for the repulsion of aggression…to any other country, [for] instance Cuba. That set the stage for Gromyko’s speech to the UN General Assembly. He took the podium on September 21 and lashed into the United States for seeking an excuse to wage war on Cuba. Repeating previous Soviet denials, he insisted: any sober-minded man knows that Cuba is not...building up her forces to such a degree that she can pose a threat to the United States or...to any state of the Western Hemisphere. The only problem with Gromyko’s statement was that it was a bald-faced lie, as a U.S. U-2 spy plane would establish just three weeks later. While he was lambasting U.S. foreign policy in New York, Soviet technicians were building launching pads for nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba. The discovery raised, as Kennedy had warned, the “gravest issues,” and brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

The World Next Week podcast is up. Bob McMahon and I discussed the upcoming meeting of the UN General Assembly; Aung San Suu Kyi’s visit to the United States; and China and Japan’s bickering over some tiny islands. [audio: http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/media/editorial/2012/20120920_TWNW.mp3] The highlights: President Obama will be speaking to the world when he stands at the UN podium next week, but his real audience will be American voters. With less than fifty days to go until the November 6 election, expect him to warn about the need to stop Iran’s nuclear program, insist on the inviolability of embassies and consulates, and restate America’s commitment to Israel’s security. A lot of UN member states will sympathize with the Palestinians in their bid to move from observer status to full member state, creating problems for U.S. diplomats who have been working quietly to keep that bid from coming to a vote. Aung San Suu Kyi is being feted during her visit to the United States, a visit that would have been unthinkable just a year ago. The Nobel Prize winner began her visit by urging the United States  to ease the many U.S. sanctions on Myanmar, a position that some human rights activists oppose. The question being debated is whether tough sanctions are needed to convince the Burmese government to carry through on its political reforms, or whether Myanmar’s political opening will stall if Washington continues to wield the sanctions club. Just as China and Japan were set to mark the fortieth anniversary of their agreement to restore diplomatic relations, tensions between the two countries escalated over who controls a few tiny, uninhabited islands in the East China Sea known as the Diaoyu in Chinese and the Senkaku in Japanese. The dispute is partly a matter of national pride, but big money is potentially at stake. Whoever controls the islands can lay claim to the potentially vast resources that can be mined, drilled, or otherwise extracted from the surrounding waters. Bob’s Figure of the Week is Xi Jinping. My Figure of the Week is 51. As always, you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out why. For more on the topics we discussed in the podcast check out: Heads of state address the UN General Assembly: The LA Times predicts that Barack Obama will stress Middle East issues in his address to the UN General Assembly. The Australian writes that Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is expected to request a vote for UN recognition of Palestine. Fars News notes that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is scheduled to address the assembly amid growing concerns about Iran’s nuclear capability. Myanmar’s opposition leader visits the United States: NPR writes that Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, will receive the Congressional Gold Medal during her 17-day visit to the United States; BBC reports that in her visit with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Suu Kyi called for the easing of U.S. sanctions on Myanmar. The New York Times notes that Suu Kyi’s trip began the same day that Burmese president Thein Sein freed 514 prisoners as the most recent attempt at political reform. China and Japan mark the 40th anniversary of diplomatic ties amid growing tensions: World Politics Review discusses escalating tensions between the two countries after Tokyo announced its intentions of purchasing the disputed Senkaku Islands. The New York Times reports on large-scale anti-Japanese demonstrations that took place in dozens of Chinese cities. Foreign Policy questions why the Chinese government has put a lockdown on websites that discuss “the U.S. history of purchasing territory.”